Welcome back to Ancient Wisdom, our series in which writers over 70 tell us how they are aging gracefully. In our most recent essay, John D. Spooner, 88, wrote about why knowing your family’s stories, and passing them along to the next generation, enriches everyone’s lives. This week, Sarah Flick explains why she wants everyone to know her family’s stories: because the world needs to remember the persecution that drove millions of Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe in the early part of the last century.
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In my 60s, I’m at a point in my life where I look backward more than I used to. I suppose a lot of people do that. What is surprising, at least to me, is that I am thinking more and more often about my long-deceased grandparents, Zaide and Bubbe, who escaped from Eastern Europe in the early 20th century.
They were part of a massive wave of pre-World War II Jewish refugees—more than 3 million Jews came to the U.S.—but the circumstances that drove them out were never well-documented. In more modern times, antisemites have seized the opportunity to recast them as a group of unusually greedy emigrants, even calling them “white colonizers,” with all its implications of privilege. I’m from the last generation that heard about the diaspora from original sources; with my own limited time remaining on this earth, I have come to feel a powerful need to tell my grandparents’ stories. Time is running out to try to set the record straight.
